The Secret Pilgrim (25 page)

As to life's other comforts, we could offer him nothing he had not got. His wife was a scold, he said, and going home after a heavy day at the office bored him. His mistress was a young fool, and after an hour with her he preferred a game of billiards to her conversation.

Then why? I kept asking myself when I had exhausted my checklist of the Service's standard-issue motives.

Meanwhile, Jerzy continued to fill our coffers. He was turning his Service inside out as neatly as Haydon had ever done with ours. When Moscow Centre gave him orders, we knew of them before he passed them to his underlings. He photographed everything that came within his reach; he took risks I begged him not to take. He was so heedless that sometimes he left me wondering whether, like the Christ he was so determined to deny, he was looking for a public death. It was only the unflagging efficiency of what we were pleased to call his cover work that protected him from suspicion. For that was the dark side of his balancing act: God help the Western agent, real or imagined, who was invited to make his voluntary confession at Jerzy's hands.

Only once in the five years that I ran him did he seem to let slip the clue I was searching for. He was tired to death. He had been attending a conference of Warsaw Pact Intelligence chiefs in Bucharest, in the midst of fighting off charges of brutality and corruption against his Service at home. We met in West Berlin, in a
pension
on the Kurfürstendamm which catered to the better type of representative. He was a really tired torturer. He sat on my bed, smoking and answering my follow-up questions about his last batch of material. He was red-eyed. When we had finished, he asked for a whisky, then another.

“No danger is no life,” he said, tossing three more rolls of film on the counterpane. “No danger is dead.” He took out grimy brown handkerchief and carefully wiped his heavy face with it. “No danger, you do better stay home, look after the baby.”

I preferred not to believe it was danger he was talking about. What he was talking about, I decided, was feeling, and his terror that by ceasing to feel he was ceasing to exist—which perhaps was why he was so devoted to instilling feeling in others. For that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of why he was sitting with me in the room breaking every rule in his book. He was keeping
his spirit alive at a time of his life when it was beginning to look like dying.

The same night I dined with Stefanie at an American restaurant ten minutes' walk from the
pension
where Jerzy and I had met. I had wangled her telephone number from a sister in Munich. She was as tall and beautiful as I remembered her, and determined to convince me she was happy. Oh, life was
perfect
, Ned, she declared. She was living with this
terribly
distinguished academic, not in his first youth any more—but look here, nor are we—and completely adorable and wise. She told me his name. It meant nothing to me. She said she was pregnant by him. It didn't show.

“And
you,
Ned, how did it go for
you
?” she asked, as if we were two generals reporting to each other from successful, but separate, campaigns.

I gave her my most confident smile, the one that had earned me the trust of my joes and colleagues in the years since I had seen her.

“Oh, I think it worked out pretty well actually, thanks, yes,” I said, with seeming British understatement. “After all, you can't expect one person to be everything you need, can you? It's a pretty good partnership, I'd say. Good parallel living.”

“And you still do that work?” she said. “Ben's work?”

“Yes.”

It was the first time either of us had mentioned him. He was living in Ireland, she said. A cousin of his had bought a tumbledown estate in County Cork. Ben sort of caretook for him while he wasn't there, stocking the river and looking after the farm and so on.

I asked whether she ever saw him.

“No,” she said. “He won't.”

I would have driven her home, but she preferred a cab. We waited in the street till it came, and it seemed to take a terribly long time. As I closed the door on her, her head tipped forward, as if she had dropped something on the floor. I waved her out of sight but she didn't wave back.

The nine o'clock news was showing us an outdoor meeting of Solidarity in Gdansk, where a Polish Cardinal was exhorting an enormous crowd to moderation. Losing interest, Mabel settled the
Daily Telegraph
on her lap and resumed her crossword. At first the crowd heard the Cardinal noisily. Then with the devotion Poles are famous for, they fell silent. After his address, the Cardinal moved among his flock, bestowing blessings and accepting homage. And as one dignitary after another was brought to him, I picked out Jerzy hovering in the background, like the ugly boy excluded from the feast. He had lost a lot of weight since he had retired, and I guessed that the social changes had not been kind to him. His jacket hung on him like someone else's; his once-formidable fists were hardly visible inside the sleeves.

Suddenly the Cardinal has spotted him, just as I had.

The Cardinal freezes as if in doubt of his own feelings, and for a moment makes himself neater somehow, almost in obedience, pressing in his elbows and drawing back his shoulders to attention. Then slowly his arms lift again and he gives an order to one of his attendants, a young priest who seems reluctant to obey it. The Cardinal repeats the order, the priest clears a path to Jerzy; the two men face each other, the secret policeman and the Cardinal. Jerzy winces, as if he has digestion pains. The Cardinal leans forward and speaks in Jerzy's ear. Awkwardly, Jerzy kneels to receive the Cardinal blessing.

And each time I replay this moment I see Jerzy's eyes close apparently in pain. But what is he repenting? His brutality? His loyalty to a vanished cause? Or his betrayal of it? Or is squeezing the eyes shut merely the instinctive response of a torturer receiving the forgiveness of a victim?

I fish. I drop into my little reveries. My love of English landscape has, if possible, increased. I think of Stefanie and Bella, and my other half-had women. I lobby our Member of Parliament about the filthy river. He's a Conservative, but what on earth does he
imagine he's conserving? I've joined one of the sounder environmentalist groups; I collect signatures on petitions. The petitions are ignored. I won't play golf, I never would. But I'll walk round with Mabel on a Wednesday afternoon, provided she's playing alone. I encourage her. The dog enjoys himself. Retirement is no time to be wandering lost, or puzzling how to reinvent mankind.

8

My students had decided to give Smiley a rough ride, just as they'd done to me from time to time. We'd be running along perfectly smoothly—a double session on natural cover, say, in the late afternoon—when one of them would start hectoring me, usually by adopting an anarchic stance which nobody, in his right mind could sustain. Then a second would chime in, then all of them, so that if I didn't have any sense of humour shining-ready—and I'm only human—they'd be trampling me till the bell rang for close of play. And next day all would be forgotten: they'd have fed whatever little demon had got hold of them and now they'd like to go back to learning, please, so where were we? At first I used to brood over these occasions, suspect conspiracy, hunt for ringleaders. Then cautiously I came to recognise them as spontaneous expressions of resistance to the unnatural harness that these children had chosen to put on.

But when they started in on Smiley, their guest of honour and mine, even questioning the entire purpose of his life's work, my tolerance ended with a snap. And this time the offender was not Maggs, either, but the demure Clare, his girlfriend, who had sat so adoringly opposite Smiley throughout dinner.

“No, no, Ned,” Smiley protested, as I leapt angrily to my feet. “Clare has a valid point. Nine times out of ten a good journalist
can
tell us quite as much about a situation as the spies can. Very often they're sharing the same sources anyway. So why not scrap the spies
and subsidise the newspapers? It's a point that should be answered in these changeable times. Why not?”

Reluctantly I resumed my seat, while Clare, snuggling close against Maggs, continued to gaze angelically at her victim while her colleagues smothered their grins.

But where I would have taken refuge in humour, Smiley elected to treat her sally seriously:

“It is perfectly true,” he agreed, “that most of our work is either useless, or duplicated by overt sources. The trouble is, the spies aren't there to enlighten the public, but governments.”

And slowly I felt his spell re-unite them. They had moved their chairs to him in a disordered half-circle. Some of the girls were sprawled becomingly on the floor.

“And governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don't,” he said. Thus delicately passing beyond Clare's provocative question, he addressed a larger one: “Spying is eternal,” he announce simply. “If governments
could
do without it, they never would. They adore it. If the day ever comes when there are no enemies left in the world, governments will invent them for us, so don't worry. Besides—who says we only spy on enemies? All history teaches us that today's allies are tomorrow's rivals. Fashion may dictate priorities, but foresight doesn't. For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars, and madmen in the world we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.”

And with the topic, thus neatly turned back to their own future, he once more warned them of its perils:

“There's no career on earth more cockeyed than the one you've picked,” he assured them, with every sign of satisfaction. “You'll be at your most postable while you're least experienced, and by the time you've learned the ropes, no one will be able to send you
anywhere without a trade description round your necks. Old athletes know they've played their best games when they were in their prime. But spies in their prime are on the shelf, which is why they take so ungraciously to middle age, and start counting the cost of living how they've lived.”

Though his hooded gaze to all appearance remained fixed upon his brandy, I saw him cast a sideways glance at me. “And then, at a certain age, you want the answer,” he continued. “You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. The trouble is, that by then you're the very people who know best that the inmost room is bare. Ned, you're not drinking. You're a brandy traitor. Fill him up, someone.”

It is an uncomfortable truth of the period of my life that follows that I recall it as a single search the object of which was unclear to me. And that the object, when I found him, turned out to be the lapsed spy Hansen.

And that, although in reality I was pursuing quite other goals and people among my eastward journey, all of them in retrospect seem to have been stages on my journey to him. I can put it no other way. Hansen in his Cambodian jungle was my Kurtz at the heart of darkness. And everything that happened to me on the way was a preparation for our meeting. Hansen's was the voice I was waiting to hear. Hansen held the answer to the questions I did not know I was asking. Outwardly, I was my stolid, moderate, pipesmoking, decent self, a shoulder for weaker souls to rest their heads on. Inside, I felt a rampant incomprehension of my useless-ness; a sense that, for all my striving, I had failed to come to grips with life; that in struggling to give freedom to others, I had found none for myself. At my lowest ebb, I saw myself as ridiculous, a hero in the style not of Buchan but of Quixote.

I took to writing down sardonic versions of my life, so that when, for instance, I reviewed the episodes I have described to you this far, I gave them picaresque titles that emphasised their
futility: the Panda—I safeguard our Middle Eastern interests! Ben—I run to earth a British defector! Bella—I make the ultimate sacrifice! Teodor—I take part in a grand deception! Jerzy—I play the game to the end! Though with Jerzy, I had to admit, a positive purpose had been served, even if it was as shortlived as most intelligence, and as irrelevant to the human forces that have now engulfed his nation.

Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. Yet in my lowest moments I was beginning to wonder whether I had become a contributor to it. But I still looked to the world to provide me with the chance to make my contribution— and I blamed it for not knowing how to use me.

To understand this, you should know what has happened to me after Munich. Jerzy, whatever else he did to me, brought me a sort of prestige, and the Fifth Floor decided to invent a job for me as roving operational fixer, sent out on short assignments “to appraise, and where possible exploit opportunities outside the remit of the local Station”—thus my brief, signed and returned to maker.

Looking back, I realise that the constant travel this entailed— Central America one week, Northern Ireland the next, Africa, the Middle East, Africa again—soothed the restlessness that was stalking me, and that Personnel in all likelihood knew this, for I had recently embarked on a senseless love affair with a girl called Monica, who worked in the Service's Industrial Liaison Section. I had decided I needed an affair; I saw her in the canteen and cast her in the part. It was as banal as that. One night it was raining, and as I started to drive home, I saw her standing at a number 23 bus stop. Banality made flesh. I took her to her flat, I took her to her bed, I took her to dinner and we tried to work out what we had done, and came up with the convenient solution that we had fallen in love. It served us well for several months, until tragedy abruptly called me to my senses. By a mercy, I was back in London briefing myself for my next mission when word came that my mother was failing. By an act of divine ill taste,
I was in bed with Monica when I took the call. But at least I was able to be present for the event, which was lengthy, but unexpectedly serene.